Shirley Phelps-Roper Hub

While it will be a bit until the Justices weigh in on whether Roper and her pals from the Westboro Baptist Church have a right to picket dead soldiers' funerals, Phelps-Roper has already penned a summary of her experience, a summary she sent to the gay blog Good As You.

Basically, Phelps-Roper loved the female Justices, but wasn't so hot on the men:

Alito was a serious disappointment. I don't know why I would expect him to man up and tell a squally rebel to drink a frosty mug of shut the hell up and AVERT your eyes.

On the other hand, the three women were lions of proper and simple First Amendment Law. When a nation is cursed of God, everything becomes so complicated and there [i]s no MAN among the people, so I find that dynamic to be altogether perfect.

Ah, well, let's see what Phelps-Roper thinks of these judicial women after they reach a verdict.

Her irritation Wednesday was not that the Rev. Terry Jones and his Dove World Outreach Center's planned bonfire would offend Muslims worldwide and probably increase the danger to American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It's that in 2008 she and her father's Topeka flock set fire to a Quran in plain view on a Washington, D.C., street and nobody seemed to care.

"We did it a long time before this guy," Phelps-Roper said by telephone from a street corner in downtown Chicago, scene of the latest Westboro picket — against Jews this time, not gays.

The difference could be that in 2008 many news media outlets had decided to ignore the group's routine of spewing hatred at funerals of fallen American soldiers.

So when Fred Phelps, calling Muhammad a "pedophilic gigolo," went online and invited people to attend the burning, most stayed away.

You know, they had so much success with their version of "Poker Face" (it's here if you missed it) they had to get this one out quickly, because it's headed with a bullet to the top of the Evangelical Top 40.

Here's a sample of the lyrical brilliance:

Shut up, shut up, RebelYou talk; God don’t hear a thing.All you got is lust, no will to just obey, obeyWha-wha-what did you say?You think God loves your praying?He hates all you doCause you love fornicatingF-fornicatingF-fornicatingHe hates all you doCause you love fornicating

No hesitation; you got more perversion to displayBut there’s no part of you ya haven’t pimped alreadyYou should’ve planned for curses from the God you disobeyNow he hates all you do cause you love fornicating (Ugh!)

Stop prayin’, stop prayin’, God will not hear you anymoreYou taught the boys & the girls to be proud whoresStop prayin’, stop prayin’, God will not hear you anymoreYou taught the boys & the girls to be proud whores

"By the time Phelps moved to Topeka in 1954, it had become the launching ground for the modern civil rights movement. That was the year the U.S. Supreme Court banned segregation in public schools with its historic Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education decision.
Jack Alexander, a Topeka native and civil rights activist, says the Brown decision opened the door for discrimination suits. Phelps would take cases in the 1960s that other lawyers, black and white, wouldn't touch, he says.
'Back in that era, most black attorneys were busy trying to make a living,' says Alexander, who attended Topeka's high school when the Brown case was filed and went on to become the first black person elected to Topeka's water commission.
'They couldn't take those cases on the chance they wouldn't get paid. But Fred was taking those cases.'
Phelps was so successful that he became the first lawyer blacks would call when they thought they were being discriminated against, says the NAACP's Scott.
'Most blacks -- that's who they went to,' Scott says. 'I don't know if he was cheaper or if he had that stick-to-it-ness, but Fred didn't lose many back then.'
Douglas, the Topeka civil rights activist and former fire chief, says Phelps was such a 'brilliant attorney' that he made enemies.
'He made a fortune on all those cases,' Douglas says. 'All the businesses hated him because he was so successful. I think if they discriminated against Martians, he would have done those cases. He could make money."

Shirley Phelps-Roper explained to the network her belief that there's no contradiction between Phelps civil rights work and his anti-gay crusading, and it hinges on the church's belief that being gay is somehow a choice:

"That's because there's a distinct difference between gay people and black people, she says.
'You're born black. It's something you can't change even if you're Michael Jackson,' she says. 'God never said it was an abomination to be black.'"

Here's the Canadian TV interview I mentioned yesterday featuring Nate Phelps, the estranged son of Westboro Baptist Church leader Fred Phelps.

Says Phelps: "Everything that's going on in America right now in [Fred Phelps'] twisted mind is about God being upset with America because they're moving in the direction of supporting equal rights for gays. So everything that's happening is a manifestation of God's wrath at the country for that."

"In his first in-depth television interview, he tells journalist Peter W. Klein about a childhood dominated by a fear of going to hell, and says the Westboro Baptist Church shares some of the same traits as a cult.
Phelps says his father regularly beat his mother and 11 siblings, used racial epithets and blamed the world’s problems on homosexuality....In the interview, Phelps says that his father was once a brilliant and well-respected lawyer who led several anti-segregation cases and was honoured by the NAACP as a civil rights hero.
Nate Phelps now considers himself an atheist."

If I can find video on the Vision TV Phelps interview, I'll post it. For now, here's a recent segment from the Centre for Inquiry, AFTER THE JUMP...